Google announced today that it has acquired Sparrow, the popular email client on Mac OS X and iOS. Why, you ask, would the Android-loving search giant pick up an Apple-exclusive email client? Because the company hopes to improve its Gmail apps with Sparrow’s talent and technology. The exact terms of the deal are under wraps, but Google might have forked over as much as $25 million for the company.

We're excited to announce that Sparrow has been acquired by Google!

We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience.

Now we're joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to all of our users who have supported us, advised us, given us priceless feedback and allowed us to build a better mail application. While we’ll be working on new things at Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users.

We had an amazing ride and can't thank you enough.

Full speed ahead!

Dom LecaCEOSparrow

Existing Sparrow apps will no longer be updated with new features – are you really surprised? – but they’ll still be supported with critical updates. More than likely, the Sparrow team has already been put to work on Google’s official Gmail apps on a wide variety of platforms. Gmail’s iOS app, in particular, could use some work, and the company’s Windows Phone app is nonexistent. It’ll be interesting to see whether Google brings Gmail out on Mac OS X, given Sparrow’s heritage, but I wouldn’t count on it.